I've been out of town the last week or so and haven't had time to open Unreal, thus the lack of posts. I'll get back to it tomorrow, but I wanted to opine about an article I read last night.
The article is on Polygon and written by Paul Kilduff-Taylor, co-founder of indie studio Mode 7. It's a great read (I read it twice), and I suggest you read it before continuing.
The piece I want to comment on is toward the end where he states that games suffer from conflicting ideologies:
We’re told that games should be narratively profound but also that nobody reads text. We’re told that "philosophically there’s little difference between developing for eSports and all players" and also shown empirically that even basic multiplayer features are irrelevant to a game’s ability to grow a community. We were told endlessly that sports games do badly on Steam; a sports game is currently Number 1 on Steam. Everyone has an opinion about what games should be or shouldn’t be.
This struck me as both a dev and a player because of the truth to it.
Building a game is hard. There's a lot of mud and a lot of unknowns, and like writing a novel or song, you don't know exactly how it'll turn out until it's done. Also like books and music, consumers double as expert critics.
Civil engineers have it easy (not really, I'm just jealous). They get to know exactly what a bridge looks like before they begin building it. Every cable, every bolt, every beam is specified on paper, rigorously tested, and committed to long before the shovel hits the ground. They know what a bridge is supposed to be, and they don't change their mind on which direction the bridge should span halfway through building it. Most importantly, drivers do not create subreddits to discuss their opinion of the bridge, and there's no expectation the engineers should modify the bridge post-completion based on driver feedback.
But games are a creative field, and as such we should never strive to build games the way we build infrastructure. You can't make something creative via formula, and I truly believe engagement with the community is critical to building a game for that community.
That first sentence in the quote makes me laugh because it's so true. Read any forum post about a game's story and they'll complain about it being shallow, predictable, or cheesy. Taken at face value, there's a huge craving for deeply storied games.
However, if you watch someone play a game with a lot of story, you see them skip cutscenes and ignore text. Players get annoyed at exposition (rightfully so), and they question if games that are just about a storied experience actually qualify as games at all. Anyone who's DM'd a game of D&D knows that player agency is above all, but that comes at the expense of a cohesive story since more player agency necessarily means less creative control. (I can talk about story all day long, but I'll save that topic for another discussion.)
Another paradox is the question of single player vs. multiplayer. Companies invest a ton of development time adding multiplayer support because of the belief that multiplayer extends a game's life and garners a community. Yet a game like Civ V has an entire online ecosystem surrounding its single player experience and largely ignoring its multiplayer. Does a giant sprawling RPG need a multiplayer PvP mode? Does a competitive shooter need a campaign mode? I'd argue no in both cases, but then players feel cheated as if they're buying an incomplete game when these pieces are missing.
These are fundamental questions, but even at the more detailed level it can be hard to know what to focus on. Tactics games need a solid core game loop, but they also fall apart without a progression system. Should you build social systems for your game to help with stickiness or should you rely on existing social media so you can keep working on the game? You have a vision for your game's economy, but players expect something different due to genre standards.
This is made even harder in the world of Early Access and Kickstarter where you're publicly building your game in front of the audience. Everybody on Reddit has an opinion about what's wrong with what you're building, even when it's incomplete. It can be both dizzying and paralyzing to have a thousand arguments pulling you in every direction. We're living in a world of a global design-by-committee, and it's a major shift in the last five years of how we create games.
It may sound like I'm being negative, but I actually think it's a super exciting time to be in this industry. Player-developer engagement is at an all-time high with things like reddit and live streaming and user-generated content and eSports and revenue sharing and Twitch. It's true that for many games now, players create more game content than developers do by orders of magnitude.
As laid out in Reality is Broken (another must-read for game devs), humans have an innate desire to connect with others while creating things. It is this emotion we're tapping into when people showw off their Minecraft servers or people stream speedruns or players engage in design debates over their favorite game.
Maybe it's not so bad having the drivers build the bridge with the engineers? Different drivers would participate in different ways, they'd key the engineers in on features that matter to them, help deliver materials so the engineers focus on other tasks, and the crowdsourced effort could help discover a flaw in the bridge they couldn't have found otherwise. At the end of the whole project, those drivers also feel a sense of engagement and ownership they wouldn't have had otherwise.
And for this reason and many others, this is why I love making games. It's exciting and crazy and unknown and creative and fun.
Regarding story, I think you hit the nail on the head when talking about cutscenes and agency. Cutscenes, in my opinion at least, are an inherently problematic story device, as they remove the player from the game.
ReplyDeleteThinking back, the only times I'm pleased to see a cutscene are when I've just taken out an encounter, or finished a section of gameplay, that was extremely difficult, required high concentration, and so on. The cutscene is a reward for my efforts. However, when they're used excessively, repeatedly, or at points in the gameplay where they're not that reward for difficult player action, they're removing agency in so much as they're taking players out of the game.
An opinion is just that, and mine has no more inherent weight than anyone else's but for me, Diablo does a great job with story. The scrolls and lore books you pick up tell you a story while you continue killing monsters. They give you an optional story segment while you continue what you're doing.
Great article! :)